As was the case with Paquin, many of Lane's alleged abuses appear to have been preventable. But state officials missed a chance to bring an early end to his actions. And once they stumbled upon evidence of inappropriate sexual behavior, the state and the Boston archdiocese decided it was better to transfer Lane to avoid public embarrassment — even though, at the time, the state could have launched a broader inquiry that might have led to criminal charges.
In the late 1970s Alpha Omega had two homes in Littleton, each housing fifteen boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen with “serious acting-out problems,” including drug or alcohol abuse and car theft. In 1976 or 1977 an evaluation team from the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services paid a visit to Alpha Omega for what was expected to be a routine inspection. But Lane refused to let the team in, saying it would be inappropriate for outsiders to observe the type of group therapy that took place there. When the team alerted its superior, John Isaacson, then the DYS assistant commissioner, he refused to intercede. Isaacson's decision, members of the team said in interviews with the
Globe,
was a serious lapse by the agency. “If we had been able to do the work we should have done at the time, there might have been some kids who weren't harmed,” said Jean Bellow, one of the survey team members. Isaacson said he does not recall discussing Alpha Omega with the team but does not dispute the account by members. He also said he discounted the team's findings because he did not trust its judgment. Rebuffed, the team never returned. Not long after, in 1978, DYS received a complaint that Lane had fondled an Alpha Omega resident at his New Hampshire cottage.
Details of the accusation offered a glimpse of a troubled facility run by a troubled priest; according to one of Lane's accusers, boys at Alpha Omega were encouraged to roll around on the floor in the nude. Questioned about the incident, Lane called it “therapeutic,” according to Isaacson. The accusation led state officials to threaten to pull Alpha Omega's license for “unusual treatment practices,” prompting Church officials to remove Lane from the facility the same year. State officials who were involved in the controversy said deference to the Church prevented the state from acting earlier.
Cornelius Coco, Alpha Omega's staff psychologist during the 1970s, didn't learn why Lane left Alpha Omega until allegations of his abusive behavior surfaced more than twenty years later, in early 2002. But he concedes that, in hindsight, there were telltale signs that all was not well at Alpha Omega. “There were occasions where Bernie would tell the staff that one of the boys had crawled into his bed, he had talked to the boy for a while, and then had sent him back to his own bed,” said Coco. Yet after removing Lane from Littleton, the archdiocese assigned him to other churches in the Boston area, where he continued to have access to children: St. Peter's parish in Lowell; St. Maria Goretti's in Lynnfield; St. Charles's in Waltham, where he was in charge of altar boys and catechism classes; St. Anthony's in Cambridge; and Our Lady of Grace in Chelsea.
Like Geoghan, whose abuse was overlooked as he was shuttled from one parish to another, Lane continued to thrive as a priest despite evidence of his destructive behavior. Not until 1993, the year Law announced a new archdiocesan policy on sexual abuse that involved a review of the personnel files of all living priests, was Lane removed from Chelsea and placed on sick leave. After three years on sick leave, Lane became associate director of the Office of Senior Priests at Regina Cleri, the archdiocese's principal retirement home for priests in downtown Boston, from 1996 to 1998 — the same post previously held by Geoghan. Lane remained in that position until 1999, even though, by then, Church officials had settled the six allegations against him, all originating at Alpha Omega. Since Lane's alleged abuses at Alpha Omega became public in January 2002, more than a dozen victims have retained lawyers.
Lane, who is now retired and living in Barnstead, New Hampshire, has denied the accusations and referred all questions to his lawyer and nephew, Gerard F. Lane II, who acknowledged that the archdiocese settled three sex abuse cases against his uncle for incidents that happened during his tenure at Alpha Omega. But Gerard Lane said he believed there was no merit to the accusations; he churned Wilson Rogers Jr., the archdiocese's lawyer, urged his uncle to settle the cases or more claimants would “come out of the woodwork.”
One of the most striking aspects of the wave of clergy sex abuse complaints triggered by the revelations in Boston was this: the allegations knew no geographic bounds. It would have been troubling enough if the abuse had been limited to New England. But around the country, there had been other Shanleys, other Birminghams, other Lanes. From Maine to Florida to Los Angeles, new victims came forward to tell their stories, emboldened by other victims who had come forward before them. And in Arizona, just as the Geoghan case was attracting wide public attention, a case that had cast a spotlight on the Diocese of Tucson was coming to an end.
In January 2002 civil lawsuits filed against the diocese by eleven men alleging sexual abuse by four Arizona priests beginning in the 1960s were settled confidentially— for an amount some estimates placed at as much as $16 million. It was a case involving Church conduct that Lynne M. Cadigan, an attorney for the plaintiffs, called “the most outrageous pattern and practice of criminal concealment I've ever, ever seen in nineteen years of sex abuse litigation.”
Among the revelations unearthed: several boys notified a Church official as early as 1976 that one of the accused priests, Monsignor Robert C. Trupia, had fondled them, yet Trupia remained in active ministry until 1992; two priests were brushed off in the late 1980s when they reported Trupia's abusive behavior to Church officials; the diocese knew Trupia had been banned from a California seminary in 1988 for arriving with unauthorized young male guests, yet promoted him twice in the sixteen years after the first complaint; and Trupia and another priest named in the suits, Rev. William T. Byrne, allegedly shared altar boys sexually at the Yuma, Arizona, parish where they served together in the 1970s.
The litany of damaging revelations seeped out of Tucson like a slow poison, prompting Arizona Church officials to hold a liturgy of healing for hundreds of parishioners after the settlement was reached. At the special service, held in February 2002, Bishop Manuel D. Moreno apologized for his role in the scandal, which had spurred the
Arizona Daily Star
to call on him to resign.
Among the eleven victims were Andrew and Arthur Menchaca, who were allegedly abused by both Trupia and Byrne in the 1970s when they were boys. Andrew Menchaca, now in his forties, said some of the abuse took place when Trupia offered to give him “private studies” in the rectory at St. Francis's Church in Yuma. With Byrne, who died of a brain turnor in 1991, the abuse also happened in the rectory, as well as during trips to Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and other cities the priest traveled to for his job as a military chaplain.
Like many victims, Menchaca had a choppy childhood. One of five siblings, he grew up in Yuma, a border town of migrant workers and deep poverty. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother later remarried and had another child. Both Trupia and Byrne forged friendships with him, he said, that made him vulnerable to their manipulative ways. “Little boys with hormones think about what sex is, but they don't know anything about it,” said Menchaca, “and then this is being done to you, and your body is reacting one way and your mind is reacting another …. You don't understand what's happening to your body and your life at this point. You know your orientation is toward a woman, but something like this is happening — somebody is telling me they desire my body, but it's not a woman. And your body responds physically.”
The other priests named as defendants were Revs. Pedro Lucien Meunier de la Pierre and Michael J. Teta. Few facts were in dispute. Trupia, who now lives in Maryland, admitted he was a “loose cannon” who was “unfit for public ministry” when confronted with the abuse allegations by his superiors in 1992. Taking Trupia's statement as an admission of guilt, Moreno immediately suspended him from duty. But Moreno's seemingly swift action came more than sixteen years too late, Church officials first learned of Trupia's abuse in 1976, when Rev. Ted Oswald notified superiors that several boys at St. Francis's told him they had been fondled by Trupia. Monsignor John Anthony Oliver said he forwarded Oswald's report to then-Bishop Francis J. Green. But Oliver said he never questioned Trupia about the allegations, “It's not my responsibility to hear those things,” Oliver testified, according to court records. “Personally, I don't care to know those things unless I have to.”
And so Trupia continued to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. In 1976, the same year of the original complaints, Trupia was named head of the Tucson diocese's marriage tribunal and associate pastor of Our Mother of Sorrows Church in Tucson. In 1982, in his first year as bishop, Moreno was notified by an archbishop at a California seminary that Trupia had been seen there sleeping with a young man. In litigation years later, Church officials said there was no evidence that Trupia and his overnight guest “were doing anything other than sleeping.”
In 1988 the same seminary alerted Moreno that Trupia had been banned from the facility for his habit of arriving with unauthorized young male guests. And a Tucson priest, Rev. Joseph Baker, said Moreno “got hostile” when he alerted him in 1989 to Trupia's habit of taking children into his bedroom. Another priest who raised similar concerns was told to “mind his own business,” according to court records. That same year, Trupia won a scholarship to attend the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to do doctoral work in Catholic canon law. No notice was sent to the university about his history of abuse. Yet even after Trupia's description of himself as a “loose cannon” prompted Moreno to suspend him in 1992, Moreno wrote the following year to the mother of one alleged victim and informed her that Trupia had denied any wrongdoing. And Moreno's eventual decision to investigate and suspend Trupia came only after the mother of one abuse victim notified Robert Sanchez, the archbishop of Santa Fe who oversaw Trupia's archdiocese, that Trupia had sexually abused her son, a former altar boy, in 1977. Sanchez himself resigned in 1993 after admitting he had had sexual relations with several women in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, Church officials never reported the accusations against Trupia to law enforcement officials. Nevertheless, the troubled priest finally attracted the attention of police investigators in 1988 and again in 1997. Both times Church officials failed to cooperate, refusing in 1997 to disclose Trupia's whereabouts to investigators even though he was on suspension and they were sending him checks. In 2001 Trupia was arrested in Yuma on seven counts of felony child molestation dating to 1973. But the charges were dropped because the criminal statute of limitations had expired.
How many Trupias were there? As long as dioceses across the country continued to keep abuse complaints confidential, the true number of abusive priests would remain unknown. Absent a policy of openness by Church officials from small-town parishes to the Vatican, the public was left to wonder whether the explosion of publicity about sexually deviant priests centered around a small minority of clergymen or only scraped at the surface of a much larger problem. Meanwhile, another issue loomed: how many victims were out there, scared, silent, and ashamed?
The Victims
F
or Peter Pollard, that moment from 1967 is indelibly imprinted in his memory. The sixteen-year-old altar boy and Rev. George Rosenkranz were alone in the church basement just after midnight on Easter Sunday morning, in the obvious early stages of a sexual encounter, when the pastor of the parish walked in on them.
Much like his peers were accustomed to doing, Monsignor William McCarthy pretended not to notice Pollard and Rosenkranz. And very much like the bishops and cardinals who have long known about the unchecked sexual yearnings of some of their priests, McCarthy sidestepped the opportunity to put a stop to it. As the Catholic Church has done for so long, McCarthy turned his back on the victim. “Could you put out the light when you are finished?” Monsignor McCarthy asked nonchalantly as he turned and walked away from Rosenkranz and his quarry.
Not long after the light was extinguished, Pollard descended into darkness. He had been an honor student at his high school in Marble-head, north of Boston, before Rosenkranz coaxed him into his first sexual experiences. But after that betrayal, his grades plummeted, his ambitions evaporated.
“I kissed a girl for the first time in the winter of 1967. I got
my
first kiss from Rosenkranz a few months earlier,” Pollard recalled.
Pollard started college but stayed less than two months. He moved around the country, by his own description an itinerant hippie who look odd jobs so he could feed himself. After the sexual abuse by a priest he had trusted, he chose to live a celibate, ascetic life for several years. His withdrawal from the world around him was so complete that even when he encountered strangers at a bus stop, he opted to stand well behind them. It was nearly two decades before Pollard reclaimed his life, secured the education he had long postponed, started a family, and threw himself into a life's vocation — working with abused children.
By the time Pollard went to the Boston archdiocese in 1988 to complain about Rosenkranz, Monsignor McCarthy was long dead. But sitting in for McCarthy, with much of the same indifference, was Law's deputy Rev. John B. McCormack.
Pollard remembered McCormack saying that Rosenkranz had some “sexual issues,” but they were not cause to remove him from parish work. Although Pollard informed McCormack that Rosenkranz, after the kissing and fondling, had asked him to masturbate for him, McCormack had a ready defense for his fellow priest. “He said some individuals growing up formed relationships with George Rosenkranz in which [Rosenkranz] might have expressed affection, and they might have interpreted these acts as sexual involvement,” Pollard recalled. Besides, McCormack informed Pollard, Rosenkranz had denied the charges. “My experience is that if they are guilty, they admit it,” the future bishop told the stunned Pollard. McCormack, he said, added that even if Pollard was telling the truth, the sexual activity was, in McCormack's view, consensual.